The Seahorse and the Boy

There were things in that house that she struggled to forget, even though they were, in and of themselves, perfectly ordinary, and certainly much less horrible than what she’d experienced.

A framed picture of a smiling woman with a little boy who shared her face in the background, playing with plastic toys. A plaster seahorse, a tiny and not very attractive thing, like a charm pulled from a cheap bracelet - and placed carefully in a bell jar as if it was a sacred object.

She didn’t know how these things and others related to the animal scream of the killer as he chased her down the hall, down the stairs, her brain frantically trying to process the environment while also operating her limbs at a speed they weren’t used to. Perhaps they didn’t mean anything at all. But she doubted it...

A grandfather clock with a spiderweb crack in the glass of its door, the brass chime smeared with generations of fingerprints. A woman’s casual wear from the 1970s, housecoat and gloves placed reverently on an armchair as if someone strained a thousand little muscles making sure they appeared just so.

She lay in her bed. It had been six months. Therapy was far from over yet. What she was most disturbed by, she suddenly realised as a cat yelped in the alley outside, was the idea that there had been something pure in the killer.

That when he’d bought her a drink and complimented her dress and seemed moved by the crease of her brow when he told her that he struggled to understand girls, that he was trying to “put himself out there” more, that she’d missed something in him that she should have seen. As if she’d gone out with a man with three eyes and then been surprised when he took out a pair of three-lensed spectacles.

And not a knife. That was another thing. They were sitting on the bed, she in her milky beige slip, no underwear, he in underwear but nothing else. She admired his body so much, the rippling textures of his muscled flesh - was she really that shallow? - that at first, she didn’t notice what he was doing when he opened the top drawer of the nightstand. So that’s where he keeps his condoms, she thought. Then a mask closed off his face and out came the kitchen knife, and her first thought was “why has he made a cake for us?” Was she really that stupid?

She’d been smart enough to know that his insane, piercing cry meant that she should run, she thought bitterly, and she had, her mind more alert than it had ever been, an entire exploding house squeezed between her temples.

She lay in her bed. The killer was lying somewhere in his, in a cell. He couldn’t leave. She could. That was the difference, she thought, as she rolled onto her side and closed her eyes against the moonlight through the window. But where she hoped to see nothing she saw instead a seahorse, with a little boy in the background.